Marie Lu is joining us today to talk about her novel, Red City. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Alchemy is the hidden art of transformation. An exclusive power wielded by crime syndicates that market it to the world’s elites in the form of sand, a drug that enhances those who take it into a more perfect version of themselves: more beautiful, more charismatic, simply more.
Among the gleaming skyscrapers and rolling foothills of Angel City, alchemy is controlled by two rival syndicates. For years, Grand Central and Lumines have been balanced on a razor’s edge between polite negotiation and outright violence. But when two childhood friends step into that delicate equation, the city—and the paths of their lives—will be irrevocably transformed.
The daughter of a poor single mother, Sam would do anything to claw her way into the ranks of Grand Central in search of a better life. Plucked away from his family as a boy to become a Lumines apprentice, Ari is one of the syndicates’ brightest rising stars. Once, they might have loved each other. But as the two alchemists face off across opposite sides of an ever-escalating conflict, ambition becomes power, loyalty becomes lies, and no transformation may be perfect enough for them both to survive the coming war.
What’s Marie’s favorite bit?
Growing up, my favorite fantasies—whether books or shows/films—were always the ones with some sort of magic system. Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time was the first series I read with a female-positive magic system: saidin and saidar, where women who used magic were more powerful than their male counterparts because they were not driven mad by it. N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season had orogeny, the power to control seismic activity. And, of course, there is Avatar: The Last Airbender’s system of bending, elemental magic that also evolved into talents like metalbending.
So, when I started building Red City’s alchemy magic system, I asked myself: what if alchemy really was a real phenomenon in our world? How would it have been incorporated into our society, shaped our history, evolved in our modern world? What would we use it for? How would we exploit it?
How could it feel realistic?
If I could tie alchemy in realistically with bits of things we are familiar with in our own history, folklore, and culture, I knew I could play with people’s minds a bit—make them wonder for a moment if alchemy was truly capable of such a thing. So, early on, when our protagonists are learning how to use alchemy, to put their hand on something and be able to change its molecules from one thing into another, they learn about how the Greek gods were actually alchemists in disguise.
What if Zeus was just a human alchemist who could create lightning by combining nitrogen and oxygen in the air? What if Demeter was an alchemist who specialized in transmuting biology, and use that for the healing of living things? What if Aphrodite was an alchemist who could curl her hand around your neck and transmute water molecules in your bloodstream into oxytocin and dopamine, the pleasure hormones of the human body, and quite literally make you fall in love with her?
What if all the ancient magic we’ve always known were explainable in this way, and alchemy has existed right under our noses all this time? What if it still existed now, and were responsible for some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of our modern age? What if it was the reason behind the economic boom of the 90s, and the advent of modern technology?
Manipulating random pieces of our world’s timeline to fit into a realistic magic system was a ridiculously fun thing to do, so much so that sometimes, I found myself asking whether it was, in fact, possible that all of these things happened because of magic. It brought out that nerdy little fantasy-loving teenager in me, the one who would stay awake until the wee hours of the night with the light on, lost in the pages of some chunky fantasy novel.
It brought out the dreamer in me, thinking of all the things that could be possible, if only.
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BIO:
Marie Lu is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 15 novels, including Legend, The Young Elites, Warcross, Skyhunter, and Stars And Smoke. She graduated from the University of Southern California and initially jumped into the video game industry, working for Disney Interactive Studios as an artist. Now a full-time writer, she spends her spare time reading, drawing, playing games, and getting stuck in traffic. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
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